Time
by Roxy206
Summary: A one shot post-ep of sorts. Rayna wants to make up for all the time she's lost.


A/N: I've been thinking about Rayna and her head space, so...

The room is dark, a sliver of moonlight coming in through the gap between the curtains. The girls are asleep and Rayna suspects that Teddy is too. She's not sure what time it is, she stopped looking at the clock once the hand passed one. She's been having trouble sleeping ever since she woke up to find herself in a hospital bed. Days had passed by her unnoticed and all she wants to do is make up for all the time she lost.

It doesn't surprise her when the darkness is broken by the backlight of her phone on the nightstand. He's always had the uncanny ability to know when she's thinking about him, to assert his presence with a phone call or an unannounced visit. She wants to let the call roll to voicemail. She doesn't want him to invade her thoughts in this way. She swore that she'd never speak to him again.

She grabs the phone and presses "answer" before it's too late.

The conversation is short, clipped. He gives her a time and a place. She can hear his pain in the break in his voice, in all of the words he doesn't say. She agrees to meet him in spite of herself. She tells herself that it's what they need: a clean break. Otherwise the calls will keep coming, she'll keep saying yes, and before she knows what's happening he'll be calling her baby and she'll be spiraling right back down with him into the abyss.

With him the lines have always been blurred. Nothing ever began or ended in a concrete fashion, instead it all ran together. Their relationship turned from partnership and friendship to romance without either of them meaning for it to happen. The shifts were subtle, just the same as when everything started to unravel. When Deacon landed himself in rehab once again and she began dating Teddy it seemed that the line was drawn with a bold marker, but it turned out to be a dry erase.

Deacon had called her then too, when he got out of rehab. Although she had confessed to Teddy that she had a moment of weakness with Deacon, that Maddie was the result, she never told him the whole truth. She never told Teddy about the proposal, that she had been ready to leave him for a future with her past.

Instead she took the ring and stashed it away with the guitar picks and love notes that he had left for her over the years. On the nights where she missed him so much that she could feel her heart breaking all over again she would pull everything out, read over his words, hum the melodies they had out to some of them. After he rejoined the band she still missed him, she still pulled out these reminders, but her heart didn't feel quite as broken with him back in her life.

She never wanted to feel that heartbreak again. It had resurfaced when he had started dating, really dating, and she thought that he would actually move on. She wanted him to be happy, she had told him, and she did want him to be happy. She hadn't imagined what that would mean though and when it came down to it, she realized that she wanted him to be happy with her again.

It was the truth when she told him that she wanted to do it all over again, changing nothing and everything. Her trajectory always seemed to end with him, no matter what. She so badly wanted this last chance to work, to be the time where they did everything over again differently. This wasn't the part she wanted to do over again. This wasn't the turn she wanted to take.

Her heart is heavy when she pulls the ring out and holds it in her hand. All this time she believed that they might get back there, to the place where things might not have been simple but they were good. She always kept an image in the back of her mind of them growing old together, singing their songs on the porch of the cabin.

It's time to let go. The memories are just as detrimental as he is. He's broken her heart time and time again, like the records and plates and furniture he's smashed in countless places. She needs to stop looking backward in order to live her life: A life that doesn't include him anymore.

This time it will be different, she tells herself. This time she's drawing the line and she's using a permanent marker for once.


End file.
